Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Depak Chopra. If I didn't know better, I'd say he was making fun of himself here. If ever there were a more clear illustration of their projection, it is here:

An intolerant faction like the Tea Party cannot be tolerated. They must be stopped with harsh, combative measures. A crazy minority is running rough shod over the executive branch and shows no sign of relenting. Fighting for your principles is more honorable than compromise with immorality and injustice. Reason is a foolish, impotent guide when you are under constant attack. The bad guys should be named in public and opposed with all necessary force. Compromise is a nice word for lack of leadership, and lack of leadership will sink us all.

We must fight with harsh measures for our principles of tolerance and non-combativeness and not tolerate people who are fighting for their principles! Harsh, combative measures! Opposed with all necessary force!

They must cram their morality and sense of justice down our throats because their morals and justice are better than ours, because we want to cram ours down their throats! Because, you know, it's wrong to think your morality is superior to anothers.

What was the term Douglas Adams used? Vanish in a puff of logic?

It is no wonder that socialist "utopias" always turn out to be giant, national gulags.

6 comments:

Well, you know - when you lose the arguments, and you lose the elections, and much of what you've done and stood for turns out to be more harm than good... then you've gotta oppose with all necessary force anyone who would point that out to you.

So congressional republicans who did not compromise on the debt-ceiling raise were leading, right? Cool. I like this guy.

Going back to read the rest of the article, I got the impression for a while that he was speaking hypothetically, but by the time I got to the end, I think he wasn't. In the penultimate paragraph, he unequivocally states:

Sometimes you do have to stop tolerating the intolerant.

which reinforces his earlier assertion.

Maybe it's considered a mark of an advanced intellect to make contradictions like:

Bad guys are always willing to sink lower than good guys ever will. Intolerance is never defeated by equal intolerance on the other side.

and then in the next paragraph say:

An intolerant faction like the Tea Party cannot be tolerated.

Which, I guess, was your point. It just really comes out and slaps you in the face when you read the whole thing.

Sad to say, y'all, this idea has a long pedigree on the left. Way back in the early 60s, Herbert Marcuse advocated "repressive tolerance," which he defined as "tolerance of movements on the left, intolerance of movements on the right." Which goes to show you two things:

1) Logic and internal consistency ain't never been the left's strong suits, and

2) higher ed has been awash in this junk for nearly half a century.

I doubt if Deepak Chopra has ever heard of Marcuse -- like most leftist ideologues, he strikes me as woefully under-educated and almost completely incurious -- but the point is, it doesn't matter. "Repressive tolerance" -- the attitude, if not the name -- comes factory standard in every humanities course in every college in the country. If we ever want to get the country back on track, we need to completely dismantle the educational system while we're fixing the debt crisis.

This is Deepak Chopra's declaration of war. Guised in his spiritualist/moralist verbal gobbledygook, which is how he pays the bills. However, he's called upon his mindfulnessians to fight anyone with a Tea Party sensibility. It's amazing. He's waving the flag, rushing to the barricades- to rebuild the Bastille, not destroy it. --Mark